What a predictably cynical interpretation. Your immediate reaction to the application of imperfect models to the real world need not be one of distrust as if slighted but rather simple acknowledgment that this is just the best we can currently do.
1. Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality. 2. If corporations like Google really wanted to do "the best we can currently do", they'd try harder but instead they just do "the best we need to do to make billions of dollars from collecting people's data."
Case in point, turns out Yandex image search is better than Google's. Google won't try harder if no one knows there's something better.
> Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality.
What do you propose they do? Have cameras on every street instead? Somehow spend a fortune to embed sensors in to every roadway on earth?
As it turns out, when you aggregate a ton of (hopefully) anonymized data, you can get some really cool shit. Like the "how busy is this business" thing they have for a lot of businesses.
Trying harder what? Trying harder to avoid showing traffic when someone with 99 phones in a cart wheel is walking in the street?
They are doing the best they can, the kind of traffic they are showing is quite close to reality in pretty much any situation.